North Carolina House Passes Anti-Community Fiber Bill

[RealBlackStuff]

People, vote with your feet!
Down with Time Warner Cable!

Bad news if you like your fiber-optics:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Nort ... ill-113433

[georgelam]

This is really sad news for those of us living in North Carolina. Time Warner basically has a monopoly around where I am, and because of this they can pretty much charge whatever they want for their terrible service and we just have to live with it.

At least I get to use my school's network when I am in the office.

[dsvochak]

Not a surprise. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, has become government of big business, by big business, for big business.

[ThinkRob]

Awesome.

(Bloody morons, the lot of them.)

I've got DSL at home (Covad, so rock solid), and I don't need much in the way of bandwidth, so I'm content. When I do, I have access to UNC's network and... well... I can saturate a 100Mbit link and nearly do so for a 1 Gbit link, so I'm happy.

[jronald]

Had Charter, but it was way to expensive. Went to Century Link and more than cut the price in half.

That said we built our home almost 12 years ago. During the building I stop by a site on the side of the road less than 1 mile from my house, as I saw the phone company at the time (Embarq) was busy putting multiple pedestals and connections in. 12 years ago I was told it was for DSL service for the surrounding subdivisions. We finally got it about 18 months ago. Not a single ditch has been dug, not a single strand of wire has been pulled in 12 years.....Im darned sure the installers were correct 12 years ago when they told me it was for DSL, why the devil did it take 11 years to finally throw the switch!

Ron

[AMATX]

Hey, cheer up; NC has the best government money can buy...unfortunately, that money is from out of state

[robert213]

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/v ... =H&RCS=155

Is is too late to send e-mails to the state senate?

http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Senate/sena ... rship.html
http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/m ... ber=Senate

[ajkula66]

jronald wrote:

That said we built our home almost 12 years ago. During the building I stop by a site on the side of the road less than 1 mile from my house, as I saw the phone company at the time (Embarq) was busy putting multiple pedestals and connections in. 12 years ago I was told it was for DSL service for the surrounding subdivisions. We finally got it about 18 months ago. Not a single ditch has been dug, not a single strand of wire has been pulled in 12 years.....Im darned sure the installers were correct 12 years ago when they told me it was for DSL, why the devil did it take 11 years to finally throw the switch!

It's really not that simple...and I doubt that those splicers from 12 years ago knew much about DSL to begin with...consider the following...

a) DSL (at least by what I've seen here in the U.S. - other countries might have different setups) works on straight copper only. Many LECs threw a ton of money into FTTP, FTTC and other "fiber" solutions during the 90s just to find out that they won't carry anything but a simple dialtone, and an occasional DS0 (56k/64k digital data) or ISDN circuit. Ooooops...

b) DSL is extremely limited by distance, and was even more so a decade ago. Back then, you were lucky to get anything working past 5,000 ft.

c) DSL doesn't work over "loaded" copper. (This holds true for most if not all data circuits). Any telephone cable with more than 6,000 ft in length should automatically be presumed to have load coils.

d) DSL doesn't work well - if at all - over bridged facilities where the same cable and pair appears in more than one location.

e) DSL has very low tolerance for imperfections in the copper itself.

f) DSL has no tolerance for environments that involve Hi-Cap (T-1 aka DS1) circuits. The old (theoretical) wisdom was that one was not supposed to install a DSL circuit within 50 pairs of a working T-1. Good luck with that in real life surroundings.

g) Unlike T-1, a DSL does not allow for a repeater to be placed in the splice to "rejuvenate" the signal.

That was the technology itself, along with facilities. Now consider the financial standpoint:

1) At that time LECs had to offer a dry copper pair to CLECs for $11 a month. Kid you not. That's one of the main reasons why many LECs stalled with the rolling out of their own DSLs in certain markets.

2) It simply makes no sense to pay a splicer $30/hr + benefits to remove a load coil and/or bridging point on a pair that you might have to lease for $11/month. BTW, it takes more than an hour to do any of the above on a single pair.

They would have done it on a T-1 that they were charging $2K a month for. No problem.

But not on a measly $150-a-month-if-we-get-lucky DSL...

3) When it comes to regulation and tariffs, DSL is viewed pretty much as another form of dialtone, with very low requirements from LECs on the copper quality side, and a 24hr repair response time requirement...LECs are not required to remove the aforementioned traps (load coils/bridges) from copper pairs as they would be on a "special" circuit (DS0, DS1, radio circuits, private lines etc...) in order to enable new service...

Money talks...

ThinkRob wrote:

I've got DSL at home (Covad, so rock solid),

In all fairness, Covad is likely the best "large" CLEC when it comes to DSL offerings.

But back to the topic at hand, I'm dead certain that The Big Boys will find their way around this nonsense that was voted into the law...

Finally, for those less familiar with the phone lingo:

LEC = Local Exchange Carrier (AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Frontier...mostly Baby Bells)

CLEC = Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (Covad, Broadview, DSL.net - providers without the "real world" facilities of their own)

[ThinkRob]

In all fairness, Covad is likely the best "large" CLEC when it comes to DSL offerings.

Yes indeed. They're also ungodly expensive if you purchase direct from them. I've got my line provisioned through a reseller (DSL Extreme) and happened to get a great price when I signed up ($25/mo for 3 mbit down, 768 kbit up), so considering the level of service I get I'm pretty happy.

That said, I'd prefer something with real upstream capacity. Something like, say, municipal fiber. I'd pay good money for a 20 mbit symmetric connection. I'd pay $100/mo for that easy, and near double that if I had a decent SLA. Now I just need to wait for our town to start their own provider...

Oh. Wait. My lovely state government's trying to fix that.

[elray]

Not a surprise. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, has become government of big business, by big business, for big business.

I know I'll have to duck for saying so, but I'd rather have big business shoulder the risk, than have the tax man come to me to subsidize the local politician's latest ribbon-cutting event.

Why can't "communities" just form coops, instead of expecting the rest of us to underwrite their wants?

[ThinkRob]

Why can't "communities" just form coops, instead of expecting the rest of us to underwrite their wants?

In a democracy when the majority want the former someone's bound to feel like they're experiencing the latter.